


After Eroda

by littlejeanniebean



Category: Adore You - Harry Styles (Song), Fine Line - Harry Styles (Album)
Genre: Drama & Romance, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23832571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlejeanniebean/pseuds/littlejeanniebean
Summary: The Boy of Eroda continues his adventures and something’s - dare I say - fishy about the El Baima archipelago…
Kudos: 2





	1. only thing i'll ever do you know who you are

He really should not have sailed on an odd-numbered day.

The Boy clung to the mast of his little boat as the waves threw him against the rocks. Something splintered. The sail was stripped away. His jars smashed and the sound of his own screams filled his ears. The deck fell out from under him and, for a moment, he was weightless. Then very, very wet.

“ _He-_ ” his head dropped beneath the waves and he swallowed salt, “ _Hel-_ ” again, “ _Help me!_ ” he kept trying to reach for something, anything. But he was alone.

The Boy didn’t think he’d ever been afraid before. He’d been sad and he’d been anxious, but never bone-stiffening, mind-racing _afraid_. He tried to lie horizontally as the cold seeped in so that he would float a bit, hopefully towards some shore… somewhere...

“Hey,” a sweet voice reached for him in the darkness, “Hey, there.”

The Boy tried to sit up, but the sand clung to his back and to his arms and legs.

“Ooh, don’t move, don’t move,” the Sunshine Woman cooed, hovering over him, pressing something cold to his head, “You’ve had a difficult journey.”

Then, she smiled.

The Boy must have looked so comically shocked because she smiled wider, and a sound he had never heard before flowed from between her peach-pink lips. No one had ever smiled at him first.

He looked up at the sculpted cliffs and light, almost feathery trees, "Where… Where am I?"

"The El Baima Archipelago," The Sunshine Woman took him to her cottage and let him lie down on her sofa. 

When the room stopped spinning every time he moved, she took him into town with her to get groceries.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” she looked at him, smiling again.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked her.

“I - I don’t know… Whatever you want to say. What’s your favorite color?”

“Uh… I don’t know… I guess… They’re all very… um… green?”

“Why?”

“Because... it’s the color of this hilltop I used to… I used to spend a lot of time there. They weren’t always good times, but… you know?”

“Yeah,” her head bobbed gracefully, “yeah, I think I do. Oh!” she sees someone she knows in the square and smiles wider than he’s ever seen. She goes over to him and presses her smiling lips to his.

The Boy finds himself smiling even though he’s not sure he likes this other guy. He finds himself smiling especially at Sunshine Woman when her other friend is not paying attention to her. How could anyone _not_ watch her, listen to her, and hold her close _all_ the time?

The Boy's question is answered one night, when he finds her on the beach where they met, staring out into the black waves. Her dress was beautiful, like always. Soft lilac with little printed flowers. But it looked wrong. Its pockets bulged oddly and the dress itself hung too heavy on her shivering body. And then she started walking forward.

“Hey,” the Boy reached out to her through the darkness, “Hey, there.”

She tried to pull away, but he held her hand firmly. Then she was clinging to him, little sobs coming from her peach-pink lips, “He… he just… he… I’m…”

“Here,” he helped her empty her pockets, “Let me show you a neat trick.”

Back at the cottage, they take some empty mason jars and he picks one up and screams, “ _It actually really stresses me out to pick a favorite color!_ ” and replaces the lid.

The Sunshine Woman cracked a small smile, held one up, and took a deep breath, “ _I’m scaaaaaaaaaaaaared!_ ”

The Boy gazed upon her with big, adoring eyes. So she took another, “ _I hate being pressured by what other people want!_ ”

And another, “ _I just want to be free!_ ”

And one more, “ _I just want to be happy!_ ”

The Sunshine Woman breathed deeply and handed the last jar to him, “You do another.”

“What should I say?” he asked.

“Whatever you want.”

The Boy took the jar carefully in both hands and looking into her eyes yelled with every bit of his being, “ _I love your smile!_ ”

She must have looked so comically shocked because he smiled shyly and stared at their shoes.

Hers shuffled closer to his centimeter by centimeter until they were exactly toe to toe. When he looked back up at her, the first thing he saw were her peach-pink lips and the next thing he felt was their softness on his.

From then on, they spent a lot of time on the beach, in the square, or just in the cottage kitchen, screaming silly things into jars. Soon there is a whole shelf of them.

The Boy started talking more and started noticing that there are things The Sunshine Woman didn't want to talk about. It surprised him at first and he tried to understand, but he just kept noticing more and more things that would make her drop her head, make her play with her fingers, or worst of all, make her smile falter. And he wouldn’t mind avoiding those things entirely if it wasn’t for the fact that they were precisely the things _he_ wanted to talk about, and wasn’t she always telling him to do just that? 

“Can we talk?” he asked.

“Sure,” she patted the seat beside her and he folded his lanky limbs in.

“Do you… Do you ever think of… doing other things?”

“... What do you mean?”

“Um… You know… just… things that… last longer than a day? Like… like opening a flower shop.”

“A flower shop?”

“We didn’t have a lot of flowers where I came from and you don’t have many here, but I know they can grow in whole _fields_ far as the eye can see and I want to find them and -”

“Okay, okay, slow down -”

“And I think you’d really like them too and I’d love it if you came with me -”

“You’re thinking of _leaving_?”

“I… It's not leaving if you come with me,” he smiled timidly.

She did not reciprocate, “What if I don't want to?"

"Then… then we can talk about it -"

"Why do _I_ have to be the one to change my mind? Why can't _you_?"

The Boy's shoulders sagged.

"Ooh," she wrapped her arms around him and tried to get him to meet her eyes, "Hey," she smiled tentatively, "I like you. You like me. What's wrong with what we have?"

"Nothing!" he said without hesitation, "... But we could have more... couldn't we?"

The Sunshine Woman pursed her peach-pink lips, "No, I don't think _we_ could."

"... Okay," the Boy nodded, "I should go," he grabbed an empty jar on the way out. 

Pacing up and down the shore, he screamed into the glassware, shut it while he caught his breath, and then continued screaming. He'd reached the brink of lightheadedness when the jar finally shattered in his hands. 

Tears stung in his eyes and he rubbed them away angrily, "You don't deserve to cry."

He remembered how she'd screamed the day she kissed him. He'd known exactly what could hurt her, smiled, and told her he would never do that.

All the Boy ever wanted was to find others like him. To know who he _was_ and not just that he was peculiar. And for all of them to belong together. He could do that, couldn't he? He could find a way to belong here. So the Boy gingerly picked the shards from his hands, brushed the damp sand from his clothes, and returned to the cottage.

"Oh!" The Sunshine Woman was having her other friend over.

The Boy presented him with a tight smile.

Her smile was of a pleading sort as she looked at him, "I'm sorry if I was too harsh earlier…"

She kept talking and kept smiling and the Boy realized something. The kind of smile he wanted to wear was not the same as hers - and _definitely_ not the same as her friend's.

"Can I have these?" he pointed at the jars.

The Sunshine Woman seemed to have forgotten they were there. 

"If you don't need them, that is."

"Sure," she smiled.

  
The Boy wheeled the jars down to the beach and was on the next boat off El Baima by sunset. Standing tall on the bow, he threw his bandaged hands out wide, _revelling_ . Smiling. Not for anyone or any reason. Just for him. Because _he_ was free. And he was happy.


	2. find a place to feel good

“This is the end of the line,” said the fishing boat captain as they rode into a wide bay that narrowed off into a river, spilling water from the blue mountains in the distance.

“Thank you,” the Boy shook his hand and wheeled the cart of his jars down the gangplank. 

“I can wait a bit for yeh if yeh’d like,” he studied his passenger, who was peculiarly dressed in a sweater made of uneven patches of red, orange, green, yellow, and blue, “No one else comes out this far and I meself only do on days that are multiples of seven.”

“It’s alright. I’m alright.”

“Alright, then. I hope you find what yer lookin’ fer, son,” and with that, the older gentleman was gone.

The Boy pushed his laden cart up the bay with no small amount of effort and stopped at the edge of a vast, green meadow. 

He laid down and took a deep breath in, face toward the sunny sky. There was an odd…  _ sweetness _ … in the air. Not a bad sort of odd like feeling a stone in your shoe, but a good sort, like how he felt whenever he smiled. Like there was something more inside of him than there was before, he just… didn’t know how to describe it. 

The Boy sat up in the tall, untouched grass and looked around. He took up his cart again and wheeled it across the rolling hills, stopping to have a good sniff every now and again. It seemed to be coming from every direction, so he went as far right as he could until the path became too steep for him to push the cart of jars, then he went as far left as he could until he came to the river, which he couldn’t cross with the cart. Finally, he went straight ahead, which brought him through a rocky valley between two peaks. 

A particularly large stone scraped against the front wheel of his cart and the whole thing tipped sideways.

“Nononono,” the Boy reached out just in time to catch the tumbling jars, “That was close…”

He held one of the jars up to the light. For all intents and purposes, it looked empty, but when he shook it and held it to his ear, he could hear a light sigh, a chuckle. 

It was certainly peculiar, he contemplated, examining the damage to his cart, how empty those sounds were to him now when they had meant so much before. 

The wheel, he decided, replacing the jar with the others, could not be repaired. 

The Boy picked up another jar, shook it, and held it to his ear. A desperate wail, his own, echoed distantly. He took a deep breath in to remind himself of where he was. 

That sweetness flooded his nostrils. He wanted to find it - needed to, really. The same way he needed to find those flower fields he’d only ever seen pictures and prints of. But at the same time, he hated being alone and those jars were all he had in this world. 

He’d come back for them, he decided, and continued through the quickly darkening valley. 

“Awoooo!” a chilling cry wrapped around his legs, stopping him where he stood. Then silence.

Although terrified, the Boy called out with all his loneliness, “Awoooo!”

The tap-tap-tap of padded paws on dry soil came from behind him. Cool blue eyes shone through the dark. 

“Just passing through,” he managed, finding the feeling in his legs again, “Mean no harm…”

The wolf’s eyes never left him, but he was allowed to pass.

It grew cold quickly and he tugged his colourful sweater past his long fingers. When he couldn’t see more than an inch ahead of him anymore, he stopped, sat down in the dirt, and fell quickly asleep. 

The wind changed its course and blew directly at him and in his subconscious state, he curled in on himself further. The Boy kept dreaming about that sweetness he was chasing. There was more to it, he thought, than the sugar on Eroda, or even the fruits in El Baima. There was a freshness to it and it wasn’t sticky so much as… could you describe a scent as floaty? It reminded him of the long still days in the middle of the ocean. Nothing but himself to reckon with, yet he wasn’t lonely in those moments, was he? How peculiar...

There was sunlight in front of his eyelids, so he opened them. It hadn’t been a dream. The source of the sweetness lay in fields before him. He couldn't see them in the dark last night. Wild flowers of pink, purple, blue, orange, red, and yellow. The flowers had fragrance. The Boy’s lips formed a little ‘o’, then slowly turned upward in an open smile. The flowers had fragrance. He laughed and took off in a run, filling his lungs with those intoxicating scents.

The Boy easily spent a day there, lounging, prancing, singing at the top of his lungs. 

“I have to bring these back…” he knelt to examine the little green sprouts with their buds still shut tight and the occasional bee or dragonfly that would carry the pollen from one flower to the next. He could take a few, if he was careful to leave enough for more to grow in their place.

The jars, the Boy decided, would make perfect vases. 

“Two, three, four…” he counted to the next multiple of seven. He could fill the jars in time.

The Boy found his cart where he left it and picked up the topmost jar, “ _ I’m scaaaaaaaaaaaaared! _ ”

Her voice, he’d come to peace with it, would always hold a special place in his heart. 

He opened another jar, “ _ It actually really stresses me out to pick a favorite color! _ ”

But he would, he vowed, find a place for his own too.

He walked back and forth, emptying two jars, filling them up with multi-colour bouquets, filling them with fresh water from the river before taking them down to the bay, then starting all over again.

Late one night, he emptied one of the jars he’d howled some nonsense into.

“Awoooo!” came the response from some distant peak. 

The Boy smiled, lighting up the dark, and opened another.

“Awoooo!” the wolf called back, enjoying the game.

“I’ll be back with more!” the Boy promised and ran to fill those jars.

When the Captain returned to the bay, he was surprised to see first the flowers, and then the albino wolf with shocking blue eyes sat next to the peculiar boy.

“Found everything yeh needed, son?” he asked, strolling down the gangplank to help get the boat loaded.

“Just about,” smiled the Boy.

“Mm!” the Captain stopped short and inhaled deeply with his eyes shut in bliss, holding a jar of flowers in front of his bearded face, “Where did yeh find these?”

“Beyond the valley,” he said.

“Yeh made it through the valley? No one has before!” he studied the boy, whom he decided did not look a bad sort of peculiar like a picture frame hung askew, but a good sort, like a rainbow in the middle of the sky even though it hadn’t rained in days. 

“It’s where I met this one,” the Boy rubbed the Wolf between the ears and the creature’s pink tongue lolled happily.

With all the flowers on board, the Captain raised the anchor. The Boy returned to vibrantly sunny El Baima and left some flowers with the people there. And he returned to the still vaguely gray Isle of Eroda and planted some flowers in the hills and along the streets of his childhood.

The Boy made many more trips with the Wolf and they both became even greater friends with the Captain.

Many years later, on an even-numbered day that was also a multiple of seven and when divided by five had a remainder of three, on one of his many ventures past the fragrant flower field, he met the Girl, but that’s another story...


End file.
